nathan28 wrote:slomo wrote:I watched about 75% of the movie before I quit. Sorry to disagree with everybody, but I don't see what the big deal is. None of the material was particularly surprising to me. Anybody who has been reading RI for several years would recognize all of the touchstones highlighted in the movie, and probably would be able to cite most of the data presented.
Did I miss something?
No, just some academics' analyses being misrepresented as "we're not liberals honestly" New Left anticommunism pretending to be radical.
Nathan, did you write that sentence after the fourteenth double scotch or was it in fact composed by a random word-generator? I think we should be told.
I stopped when the special guest appearance turned out to be John Taylor Gatto, who claims that reading Julius Caesar's autobiography in Latin was standard in seventh grade (or was it eighth? anyway I'm not making that part up) in "'aught-eight'" when he was teaching. Dude is right about some things but really just a cranky reactionary joker. Kinda sucked b/c I wrote it to DVD so I didn't have to watch it on a tiny, tiny screen.
There was no "special guest appearance" by Gatto or anyone else. He was one of about two dozen speakers in the damn thing. Nonetheless, nathan, I apologise for having ruined your evening by recommending a film that featured at least one speaker you didn't agree with 100%. Mea culpa, and shame about that wasted dvd. I hope you can recover from the pain someday, perhaps with the help of a qualified trauma therapist.
slomo wrote:None of the material was particularly surprising to me.
Well, good for you, slomo. But then, you're not everyone.
slomo wrote:Anybody who has been reading RI for several years would recognize all of the touchstones highlighted in the movie, and probably would be able to cite most of the data presented.
No doubt. But then not everyone has been reading RI for several years, or even for several minutes. In fact, very few people have been reading it at all.
I presented these films as resources worth sharing, not least because they are shorter than several years. I didn't expect a cacophonous outbreak of sniffing from Renaissance Men so exaltedly well-informed that nothing can ever surprise them, much less interest them.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966
TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC